Nest Among The Stars

Uncertainty - Part 9

Sitting in the shuttle with the lighting off helped him to think. In sharp contrast to how he felt only a few days ago, he now wanted to be alone — at least for a while. Doors had been opened which Michael preferred to keep closed. He had always accepted the official line about spiritual matters. Things non corporeal were merely voyages into fantasy for those with low self esteem, overactive imaginations, or more serious psychological issues. Religion was dangerous, organized religion evil. Such thinking separated you from reality. Now Nathaniel was trying to convince him 'religious' concepts underpinned reality; that it was not possible to understand the functioning of the universe without first accounting for God's presence in it.

Michael was having difficulty accepting the premise put forward by his strange companion. Human achievement had not lessened in the absence of God. If anything, it had advanced exponentially since the time most humans had come to accept God's non existence. Officially excluding God from our lives unified us. In removing God, one of the greatest stumbling blocks to cooperation among humans was removed. We drew closer to replicating those activities once only credited to the divine when we realized such things were no longer reserved to God. He was credited with creating worlds, but all these worlds turned out to be useless balls of rock and dirt — we created livable worlds from unlivable ones.

God was said to be the giver of life, but they were lives filled with infirmities, disease and illness — we spliced genes and cloned life, improving on nature's imperfections. God created people enslaved by imperfect thinking, mystical notions, fears and psychosis limiting their rational thought — we freed people to think for themselves, and we created perfect intelligence, albeit artificial. God gave us guilt for our sins — we absolved people from sin by excluding a sin nature from any explanation for their wrongful actions. Everything could be explained, and explained away, by the application of human reason. Why bother with God?

Long ago individuals and nationalities who opposed Earth's coming together under the authority of a central secular government were dealt with. Education and re-education eventually created a cohesive world working towards common goals. Religious differences no longer interfered because there was no religion. Small groups persisted to practice their arcane beliefs, but over the years they drew fewer and fewer adherents, overwhelmed by state sponsored secularism, until they died out. The fervently deluded were still to be found but their numbers were inconsequential.

The spirit of God abandoned the planet; we were left to our own devices and we succeeded. Sanctions and persecutions were not needed to end 'religion's' destructive hold on humanity. Tolerance for all religious beliefs, while officially disapproving of them and removing the privileges religions had long been granted in government budgets, was all that was required.

Patiently society convinced most against the superstitious falseness associated with their many versions of God. We brought them all together; gave the world one state-sanctioned religion, and then we slowly made it our own — we made it secular. We brought reason and intellect to bear on it until such time as only human knowledge and ability held any hope for salvation. Once the vast majority of people were willing to put aside the primitive fairy tales, then scientific reasoning became the accepted norm for humans to aspire to. And now Nathaniel said it was otherwise. He was deluded, irrational, feeble minded — it wasn't possible that so many others could be wrong.

So what was Nathaniel trying to do? Set aside centuries of progress? Did he believe himself to be an emissary of God — a transcendent being upset that we had lapsed into falsehood and now needed to be guided back to 'Him'? Possibly Nathaniel was an 'Alien' trying to confuse us, get us to go back to our internecine ways, weaken us, having us destroy each other so they could take over with minimum effort. But no, he was a flesh and blood human; the scanner confirmed that about him. Then why did he speak the way he did, like a zealot from some long forgotten cult? God and time and reality, 'the true nature of the universe' he had said. Did we really need to accept God's place in the universe before we would be able to comprehend the mysteries it still held and for which science had not yet answered? Was 'He' the final piece to the puzzle, the missing link to competing theories about where everything, including we ourselves, came from?